Oh, the Places We Go!
Kelly loves to be busy doing things. She doesn’t like sitting around the house. I can use a day of doing nothing every now and then. But over the years, I’ve learned to appreciate, more and more, just how important Kelly’s instinct for doing things is. Because, generally speaking, we don’t sit around doing nothing. We often fill our weekends with activities, many of them short trips to all kinds of places that I wouldn’t have thought to visit, were it not for Kelly’s inspiration and example. Because of this, our kids have seen a lot of things, more than I can remember seeing as a child of the same age.
Back in April, I began jotting down a list — from memory — of the places we’ve gone with the kids. The list includes, in the order which the places came to me:
- Colonial Williamsburg
- Castine, Maine
- Acadia National Park
- Central Park, New York, NY
- Shenandoah National Park
- Berkeley Springs, West Virginia
- Disney World
- Legoland, Florida
- Dutch Wonderland, Pennsylvania
- Hershey Park, Pennsylvania
- Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia
- Moniticello
- Smithsonian Air & Space museum (and annex)
- Smithsonian American History museum
- White House Easter egg roll
- Building museum, Washington, D.C.
- Spy Museum, Washington, D.C.
- Alamo, San Antonio, Texas
- Riverwalk, San Antonio, Texas
- San Francisco, California
- Space Needle, Seattle, Washington
- Seattle Underground
- Clackamas Falls, Washington
- Great Falls, Virginia
- Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
- Mount Vernon, Virginia
- Charleston, South Carolina
- Savannah, Georgia
- Mystic Seaport, Connecticut
- Sturbridge Village, Massachusetts
- Bangor, Maine
- Bronx Zoo
- National Zoo
- Bear Mountain, New York
- St. Augustine, Florida
- Daytona Beach, Florida
- Naples, Florida
- Edison-Ford estate
- Howe’s Caverns, New York
- Luray Caverns, Virginia
- Fort Knox and the Penobscot Narrows, Maine
- Newport, Rhode Island
- The Breakers mansion
- Annapolis, Maryland
- The United States Naval Academy
This is by no means a comprehensive list, just the stuff that immediately came to memory. In writing down the list, however, it made me conscious of just how much I couldn’t remember.
I have read that, when visiting a historic site, the act of taking lots of photos takes away from the experience. A place is less memorable when you take more photos, because you are focused on taking a good photo, as opposed to what you are taking a photo of. You are less in the moment. I don’t know if this is true, but it sat with me for a long time, and it recently collided with the thought that, while we’ve taken the kids to a lot of places, the list I can come up with off the top of my head is relatively small.
I began to think that I was missing an opportunity to write about these adventures of ours. I enjoy reading travel writing, why not try my hand at writing some of it. And thus, a blog was born. In all honesty, the audience I have firmly in mind for this are my kids. I want a place that they can go to as they older, and relive the adventure we had as they grew up, revisit all the places we went, and perhaps be reminded of places and things that they had forgotten.
